My interest, in this paper, is primarily speculative, i.e., to explore the poetological intent behind Ahmad Sh?ml?’s encounter with the general problem of translatio—defined by Rebecca Comay as “the circulation of things, ideas, and power within the global continuum of space and time;” and secondarily political, i.e., to articulate the critical dimension of Shamlou’s radical shift toward the translation of non-Persian modernist poetry. I will argue how by foregrounding the practice of translation as philology’s true essence, Shamlou expressed a subversive disenchantment with the then popular domain of nationalist Iranian philology, represented by the literary establishment of his time, which by drumming into people’s minds a sense of cultural continuity and national pride advanced the imperial and nationalistic fantasies that underlined the Pahlavi’s cultural and linguistic reform programs. Indeed, these cultural reform programs were specifically designed to subjugate the diffuse cultural identities and class conflicts comprising Iranian society at the time into a unified administrative whole by fostering an essentializing view of the Iranian nation as a body of people united by a language (Persian) and a common essence, that is, their poeticalness. I will argue that as the official culture was appropriating classical Persian poetry and language as a means toward its own political ends, the dynamic and heterogeneous material of Shamlou’s translations, whose identity is no longer fixed or rooted in a single linguistic origin, emptied out the ontologically privileged position reserved for the Iranian national self. Finally, I will discuss the dialectical link between Shamlou’s loyal attachment to the then popular idea of proletarian internationalism—both as an ideal abstract utopia and a concrete sociological concept—and his practice of translation. Through a close social reading of his translations of Federico García Lorca, I will argue that these translations should be read as a critical-lyrical response to the construction of a regressive autocratic nationalism, and above all, to the total organization of society by an authoritative state, whose aim was to subsume the poetical phenomena under national categories and categories of authority. As ironic as it may sound, through a detailed textual analysis, I will show how the politically reinvigorated modernism of these translations should be seen as a revolt against the hyper-politicization of poetry.